Apify Proxy

Apify Proxy is not a standalone proxy marketplace in the traditional sense. It is the proxy layer baked into the Apify scraping platform — the same Prague-based company (founded 2015) that builds the Actor framework used by thousands of web scraping developers. Rather than running its own residential peer network or buying mobile carrier blocks, Apify Proxy aggregates IPs from several upstream providers and load-balances between them, then exposes the whole thing through a single endpoint that integrates natively with Apify Actors, Crawlee, and the Apify SDK. The result is a proxy product aimed squarely at developers who are already running scraping jobs on the Apify cloud and want one invoice instead of two.

The catalog spans four buckets: shared datacenter IPs, dedicated datacenter IPs, residential IPs, and Google SERP proxies. Datacenter and SERP pools are accessed through Apify's own infrastructure with intelligent rotation — the system routes each request through whichever proxy has touched the target host least recently, and runs periodic health checks to retire dead or banned IPs. Residential coverage advertises "custom geolocation" with arbitrary country selection, though Apify does not publish a hard total IP count or country list the way BrightData or Oxylabs do. Session control is workmanlike: residential sessions persist for one minute by default but can be prolonged by reusing the session ID, while datacenter session/IP combinations stick for around 26 hours.

Pricing is published on the proxy page and broken out by type. Shared datacenter starts at $0.60 per IP, dedicated datacenter at $7 per IP, residential at $8 per GB (dropping toward $10 per GB at volume on some tiers), and Google SERP at $1.9 per 1,000 SERPs. Access is gated behind the platform plans — the free tier includes a small datacenter allocation, and paid plans (Starter at $29/month, Scale at $199, Business at $999) bump up the proxy allowances, lower per-unit rates, and unlock priority support. There is no separate proxy-only subscription and no money-back guarantee specifically for proxy spend; refunds follow the broader Apify platform policy.

The standout feature of Apify Proxy is the integration. If you are already writing an Actor in JavaScript or Python using Crawlee, switching on residential or datacenter proxies is a one-line config change inside the run. Playwright, Puppeteer, and Cheerio crawlers in the Crawlee stack get proxy support out of the box, sessions are managed by the SDK, and traffic statistics show up in the Apify Console next to the Actor's dataset. HTTPS is supported across all proxy types; SOCKS5 is not the headline transport here. Google SERP proxies are a genuinely useful niche — they return search result pages from a clean IP without you having to wire up a separate SERP API.

Apify Proxy makes the most sense for teams already committed to the Apify platform for scraping orchestration, or for developers who want proxies, compute, queues, and storage from one vendor. It is also a reasonable pick for SERP scraping thanks to the dedicated Google endpoint. It is not the right choice if you want a pure proxy product to plug into your own stack — BrightData, Oxylabs, Decodo, and IPRoyal all offer larger published residential pools, more granular city/ASN targeting, and dedicated dashboards. Sneaker copping, mobile-only workflows, and ISP-static use cases are not part of the Apify Proxy story; the residential pool is wholesale-aggregated rather than a first-party peer network, so freshness and country granularity sit a notch below specialist providers.

Limitations worth knowing before you buy: Apify Proxy does not publish total IP count, country count, or success-rate benchmarks, which makes apples-to-apples comparison hard. There is no dedicated mobile (4G/5G) or ISP-static product. SOCKS5 support is limited compared to general-purpose proxy vendors. And because access is tied to platform plans, the cheapest practical entry point is the $29 Starter tier — you cannot buy a few GB of residential traffic without taking the Apify subscription with it.